Sunday, November 10, 2013

I wrote this poem some years ago, though I have not republished it since its inclusion in the 2004 Arvon Poetry Competition prize-winners' anthology (it was commended in the competition that year).It recalls the D-Day landings of the last world war - and in particular, the landings on Juno Beach, which were conducted by Canadian and British forces. While we British may grumble that Hollywood renderings tend to focus solely on the American contribution to the assault, the role of Canadian troops tends to be overlooked far more often than that of the British - so one motivation behind this poem was to redress that (however modestly). Nevertheless, the poem is intended to commemorate all of the Allied soldiers who took part.One of the warships that undertook naval bombardment of the coastal defences ahead of the landings, the cruiser HMS Belfast, is moored in London, on the Thames, to this day - a floating museum.Like so many of us, my own family was involved in the terrible struggle of that war: my grandfather, who served in the Royal Navy, was twice torpedoed - his ships sunk - but thankfully, survived. The stories that came down from those days are deeply impressed within me, together with grief for what they went through, and awe for what we owe them.

The Fetch

Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination

CAST

The Body in the Well

About Me

My debut full-length poetry collection, ‘The Fetch’, was published by Nine Arches Press in October 2016. A pamphlet of poems, ‘The Body in the Well’, was published by HappenStance in 2007, and my work has appeared in The Poetry Review, Poetry London, The Rialto, Magma, The North, Agenda and elsewhere, including several anthologies. My book on Coleridge’s poetry, philosophy and the transnatural, ‘Coleridge and the Daemonic Imagination’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011) won the University English Book Prize 2012. I have written radio drama for the BBC, and was awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship in 2013. I am Reader in Literature and Creative Writing at Birmingham City University, where I am Director of the MA in Creative Writing and the Institute of Creative and Critical Writing.